Stop Envying the Super Productive. Extreme Ambition Is a Form of Mental Illness (Just Ask Elon Musk)
Sites like Inc.com (where I am a daily columnist) celebrate exceptional achievement and aim to help readers pursue greatness, but is super success all it’s cracked up to be? If you knew the real costs (and the roots) of being a household name, would you actually want that life?
That’s the fascinating question at the heart of a handful of recent articles that question whether what we usually cheer as great success isn’t often just a manifestation of a troubled personality and a whole lot of pain.
Extreme output comes from extreme personalities.
Take the case of best-selling author Danielle Steel. Having churned out a mind-bending 179 books, she’s won herself a legion of fans and a hefty personal net worth. How did she do it? Simple, she works 20 hours a day.
No, really, that’s straight from the horse’s mouth in an interview with Glamour: “I don’t get to bed until I’m so tired I could sleep on the floor. If I have four hours, it’s a really good night for me.”
Commenting on this interview, author and Guardian journalist Oliver Burkeman points out that “before the dawn of the gig economy, which made it mandatory to celebrate unrelenting toil as…
